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In California, New Talk Of Limits on Immigrants

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When times were good in the 1980's, California largely welcomed the millions of domestic and foreign immigrants who flooded into the state. But now that times have turned tough, a cry has risen to narrow the gates to the Golden State.

The cry has been led by Gov. Pete Wilson, a Republican, who has been saying that immigrants, foreign and domestic, are putting the state in a fiscal squeeze by using more in services than they pay in taxes. Critics say it is nothing more than an racist attempt to find a scapegoat for the intractable social problems that have been building in California for two decades.

Almost from the Gold Rush days, California has vacillated between welcoming immigrants and resenting them. Thousands of Chinese laborers were brought in to build the railroads before the turn of the century, and then were excluded in a wave of anti-Chinese hysteria. During the Depression, waves of Okies migrated in search of opportunity and found hostility.

The latest great wave of immigration during the 1980's, when millions of immigrants from other states and from Asia and Latin America poured into California, added to the state's political power and wealth. Although a few environmentalists raised doubts about how many more people the state could absorb, the subject of controlling population was taboo in polite circles, where people feared being accused of racism. Breaking the Taboo

But suddenly that taboo has been broken. The state is mired deep in recession, and Governor Wilson says there are no longer enough taxpayers to support the growing ranks of tax receivers, many of them immigrants. He visited Washington on Nov. 25 to ask for more Federal help for California, which absorbed 35 percent of all the legal foreign immigrants to the United States during the last decade.

And in an interview in the Nov. 18 issue of Time magazine, the Governor argued that the state must reduce the "magnetic effect" of its generosity. While he does not claim that immigration is the central reason for California's fiscal troubles, he has said welfare payments that average $660 a month, nearly double the national average, are attracting immigrants here.

Governor Wilson's comments have set off a spirited debate, with some critics drawing parallels to the recent campaign for governor in Louisiana, where David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan leader, ran as a Republican on a platform that some saw as racist and anti-immigrant.

State Senator David Torres, a Los Angeles Democrat who was chairman of a special Joint Legislative Committee on Refugee Resettlement, said Mr. Wilson "ought not to use the immigrants as the scapegoat for failed economic policies."

Governor Wilson has denied any racist intent. The state's dominant newspaper, The Los Angeles Times, agreed but editorialized Wednesday that the Governor's words could be misinterpreted as "the search not for answers but for scapegoats, political or otherwise." Staggering Growth

The debate has underscored the fragility of the social compact of California, the most ethnically diverse state in the nation. According to the Census Bureau, the state gained a staggering 6.1 million in population over the last decade and now is home to 29.8 million. Of that increase, a little more than half came from migration, about evenly divided between migrants from other states and from foreign countries, not counting illegal immigration.

By most analyses, this immigration played a major role in the California boom by providing a cheap labor force and large numbers of entrepreneurs starting up businesses who added to the demand for housing and services. As recently as 1988, the state returned $1 billion in rebates to taxpayers.

But this year, the state was forced to bridge a $14.3 billion budget gap, a gap that is still growing. According to a recent analysis by the state's Department of Finance, this is largely because of a rapid population shift in which the number of young people, who need schooling and other services, has exploded and economically productive people between the ages of 45 and 64 have moved out of state.

Should these demographic changes persist, the report stated, this "imbalance between taxpayers and tax receivers" could cause a $20 billion budget gap by the year 2000. By that time, it estimated, the state's dependency rate -- that is, the proportion of people under 18 and over 64 years old, who tend to need social services -- would rise from 58 percent today to 68 percent. Immigrants on Welfare

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The department attributed the fiscal troubles in part to immigrants. It said that in 1990, foreign immigrants accounted for 4.5 percent of the caseload of Medi-Cal, the state's medical aid program for low-income persons, as against 1.3 percent in 1980. The caseload will increase to nearly 13 percent by the year 2000, it projected.

Experts link the reason for the demand on social services to several factors, including new laws and the change in the type of migrants from other states. Kassy Perry, spokeswoman for the state's Health and Welfare Agency, cited the Federal Immigration Reform Act passed by Congress in 1986 that granted amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants and other Federal laws that made about 300,000 additional persons eligible for Medi-Cal in 1988.

And while illegal aliens are ineligible for welfare, their American-born children are not, and the Supreme Court has ruled that local schools must accept such children. Caseloads forAid to Families with Dependent Children, the state's main welfare program, have tripled to two million over three years.

And refugees, mainly from Vietnam, Cambodia and other Southeast Asian countries, who have settled in California in recent years have been a particular burden. Forty percent of the refugees go on welfare in their first year, Ms. Perry said. About 7 percent of the general population is on welfare.

But it is not just foreign immigrants who are burdening California services. Seven percent, or more than 140,000 people, of the Aid to Families with Dependent Children caseload is accounted for by persons who moved to California from other states in the last 12 months. Avoiding the Question

The issue of controlling population has long been a delicate one, tinged as it is with racial and ethnic overtones. The question was avoided in a recent report by a panel at the Sacramento campus of the California State University, which was trying to achieve some consensus on growth management among interest groups.

Environmentalists tried to get a discussion going on the subject, but their attempt was rejected by Hispanics on the panel. "That was a sign of how difficult the issue is, especially if your parents were illegal," Larry Orman, executive director of the Greenbelt Alliance, a nonprofit group that promotes the preservation of undeveloped land around San Francisco, said last week in an interview. "How long can California maintain an open-door policy for immigrants who require services? Even if they climb out over time, California has only so much resources financially."

Another member of the panel, Fernando J. Guerra, chairman of the Chicano Studies Department at Loyola Marymount University, whose parents came from Mexico, said in an interview that the focus on immigrants was "classic scapegoating." He argued that the critics of immigration fail to take into account the role immigrants have had in fueling the economy.

But George J. Borjas, an economist at the University of California at San Diego, author of "Friends or Strangers" (Basic Books), a 1990 book on the economic effects of immigration, maintained that there is some validity to Governor Wilson's statements.

"The new immigrants are joining the welfare system at a much higher rate than the older immigrants," he said. "It's a net loss for the country. They're taking more out than they're putting in. They seem to be more unskilled and they have less education."

Another expert on immigration, Julian L. Simon, a professor of business administration at the University of Maryland and author of the 1989 book "The Economic Consequences of Immigration" (Basil Blackwell), agreed that in the short run new immigrants may represent a burden to the state.

"But in the long run, California is definitely helped by immigration," he said. "It's important to focus on the long-run situation rather than the little blips."

A version of this article appears in print on December 3, 1991, on Page A00020 of the National edition with the headline: In California, New Talk Of Limits on Immigrants. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe